- #1
It's a very standard power fantasy set in fictional china in a world where magical energy started appearing. The story itself is nothing to write home about and can be easily followed despite the somewhat poor execution for a standard premise. The prose is... ok.... there's a lot of info dumping that does not help the flow of the story and can be tolerable in small doses but annoying when binge reading.The main issue is the lack of consideration in the story with itself and its characters. Despite involving time travel between a middle aged adult to its teen years as a second chance, the MC behaves like a reckless teen/young adult that does things with little thought or consideration and seems to have no emotional depth. Mentioning the age of MC pre-time travel yet not delving into the emotional struggles and regrets of a 2nd chance, clearly indicate the lack of events in life or an unwillingness to explore MC's second chance.We do not see any sort of emotional growth in the MC or behavior outside a set personality. Emotional struggles are only reserved for the MC's family due to pre-time travel downfall and even then are quite minor. A traumatic event from pre-time travel was easily solved in 2-3 chapters aiming to showcase the gap between life experience of MC and teen schoolmates yet all it does is indicate MC has no regard for others or himself as he's able to get into a romantic relationship with FMC despite being double the age mentally and showing no internal struggle about it.Although it is reasonable that if the MC goes to the past, using future opportunities to succeed is a given, the MC has a strikingly low emotional range or personality expression given most of the time it is flirt with FMC, get stronger, kill enemies, scheme, and repeat. MC's consistent one dimensional personality is incompatible with the setting offering the chance to explore a variety of issues in the characters which seems to again and again get squandered by the constricted personality. While it can be chalked up to years in the battlefield with the monsters, real soldiers are scarred for life yet having MC seemingly be "sane" and showing no expression of inner turmoil just makes the dissonance of reading the story stronger.The system does not help the case of the story either as it streamlines any sort of development by making MC op and any sort of attempt at conflict even more ridiculous with no stakes.